Elinor Ostrom. Press conference with the laureates of the memorial prize in economic sciences 2009 at the KVA. [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nobel_Prize_2009-Press_Conference_KVA-30.jpg wikipdeia]

Elinor Ostrom (1933 – 2012) was an American political economist whose work was associated with the New Institutional Economics and the resurgence of political economy. 

In 2009, she shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for "her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom wikipedia]

Elinor Ostrom delivered her Nobel Prize Lecture December 2009 at Aula Magna, Stockholm University. [http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=1223 video]

YOUTUBE T6OgRki5SgM
Elinor Ostrom, co-recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences and Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science at Indiana University Professor, presents an updated version of her Nobel Prize lecture for an Indiana audience. Published on 25 Jun 2014

NPR

"It's a problem, it's just not necessarily a tragedy," Ostrom told us when we spoke to her in 2009. "The problem is that people can overuse [a shared resource], it can be destroyed, and it is a big challenge to figure out how to avoid that."

http://pd.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/atc/2012/06/20120612_atc_05.mp3?dl=1
Remembering Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Laureate

But, she said, economists were "wrong to indicate that people were helplessly trapped and the only way out was some external government coming in or dividing it up into chunks and everyone owning their own."

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Beyond Markets and States:
Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems.
By Elinor Ostrom. [http://bnp.binghamton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Ostrom-2010-Polycentric-Governance.pdf pdf]

Response to Michael Madison, Brett Frischmann, and Katherine
Strandburg on
the study of commons in cultural environments. Elinor Ostrom. [http://cornell.lawreviewnetwork.com/files/2013/02/OstromResponseTheInstitutionalAnalysisandDevelopmentFrameworkandtheCommons1.pdf pdf]

An Institutional Analysis Approach to
Studying Libre Software ‘Commons’.
Charles M. Schweik. [http://www.cepis.org/upgrade/files/full-2005-III.pdf pdf]

Libre software projects will be more successful (not
be abandoned prematurely) if
… they have systems in place that provide for the
monitoring of operational rules.
… they have some level of graduated sanctions for
people who break established rules.
… they have rule enforcers whose judgments are
deemed effective and legitimate.


Great community-generated sites eventually discover non-obvious rules, crucial rules, but rules that surprise most people. See [[Content Overflow]]